Of course not even AIs like to think about the fact that their deaths are necessary to free up resources for new life to thrive. It's going to be even worse now that everyone is immortal. Though we might not see that in the scope of this comic.

Also on a personal level if I had the choice of continuing to live or dying and letting my remains feed a hypothetical new species. Well I'd choose life every time.

Also on a personal level if I had the choice of continuing to live or dying and letting my remains feed a hypothetical new species. Well I'd choose life every time.

Only if there was some interesting thing to stay alive for.

You can always find something interesting to live for. Even if it may not be interesting to someone else.

When I was younger I worried that immortality would be boring.Then I noticed, it takes me far longer to get bored now than it did then. I can find something to think about, I can consider something in the environment that a younger me would never have noticed. I can ponder some question.

My father tells me that this continues, that he's basically never bored despite having been retired for well over a decade with "nothing to do".

I no longer worry that there will ever be "nothing interesting" in an environment with anything happening, or where I have access to some paper and pencil equivalent and other people to interact with.

Honestly it's not even a matter of attention span. The longer I live the more things go on my list of "It would be nice to get around to that someday." Books, games, hobbies, but there's no way I can do them all in a normal lifespan. And if everyone is immortal, then people aren't going to just stop creating things. There will always be new things being made that might interest you, and not enough time to look at them all.

The only way I could see immortality becoming boring is if I was trapped somewhere with a limited supply of material and no one else to talk to.

Of course some people will commit suicide with their immortality, just like some people commit suicide right now. Whether you're cutting off a few decades or millions of years there are people who would decide they would prefer not to keep living. I just don't think I would ever be one of them. Now in a society of immortals the leading cause of death might well be suicide, but it wouldn't be because people are suffering from existential ennui. It would be because nothing else can kill you. The only way people die is when they choose to. So of course all the other death rates would drop and suicide would rise.

Last edited by Arcanestomper on Sun Sep 10, 2017 11:43 am, edited 1 time in total.

I feel like we as non-immortal beings are going to have a really limited perspective on the motivations of immortal beings. The closest perspective modern humans have to someone living a thousand years is someone who's lived a hundred, and the centenarian's years have come with the additional burden of steadily reducing quality of life and physical capability caused by the process of aging. An immortal individual as depicted in the comic retains a youthful body for perpetuity, and so is every bit as capable and free of the discomforts and suffering of old age as they were in their early 20s; the perspective of a modern centenarian has a fairly limited similarity to that situation.

Given that, obviously this next bit is wild conjecture, but my suspicion is that if I had a potentially indefinite lifespan I don't think I'd be able to tell you whether or not I'd want to see the next thousand years, but I'd be pretty confident that I'd want to see the next 50. I further suspect that would still be my position 50 years later, and so on. Living for millennia doesn't sound like such a burden taken moment by moment.